Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Of Wingnuts And True Believers

It's not exactly the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos, but it's just as fun in it's own way.

 
July 8th marked the 65th anniversary of the Roswell incident and I meant to do a post on it but that intention got lost somewhere in the multiverse.  Today I ran across this article and found out it has been featured somewhat prominently in papers and blogs all across the country.  The original article is longer and ran on Huffington Post.  The following is the hi light version of that article.

Ex-CIA agent: Roswell, N.M., incident really happened

By Melanie Eversley - USA Today - 7/10/2012
A former CIA agent is going on the record to say the alleged UFO incident on July 8, 1947, in Roswell, N.M., really happened, the Daily Mail and other news organizations report.
Chase Brandon, who worked 35 years with the CIA, said documents regarding the alleged landing of beings from outer space are locked up at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va.

"It was in a vaulted area - there was one box that really caught my eye," the Daily Mail quotes Brandon as saying. "It had one word on it: Roswell. I rummaged inside it, put the box on the shelf and said, 'My God, it really happened.' "

Brandon makes the comments during the 65th anniversary of the alleged incident, which military officials initially explained as the capture of "a disc," but later explained away as a weather balloon, according to the Daily Mail.

"It was not a weather balloon - it was what people first reported," the news organization quotes Brandon as saying.

The Huffington Post quotes Brandon as saying, "It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet."
Brandon worked as an undercover, covert operations officer in the CIA's Clandestine Service, where he focused on missions on international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics and weapons smuggling, according to Huffington. He spent his final decade with the agency as liaison to the entertainment and publication industries, and it was during this time - in the mid 1990s - that he walked into the vaulted Historical Intelligence Collection area at CIA headquarters, according to the news organization.
Brandon said the box contained written material and photographs, according to Huffington.

"That's all I will ever say to anybody about the contents of that box," Huffington quoted Brandon as saying. "But it absolutely for me was the single validating moment that everything I had believed and knew that so many others believed had happened truly was what occurred."

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First off a few things I verified, Mr Brandon was a CIA operative, and Mr Brandon is currently pushing a work of science fiction in which aliens figure prominently.  This is the kind of connection book publishers love.  Mr Brandon can not offer, or will not offer, any tangible proof of his claim and so we have to take his story on faith.  No wonder that authors of the New Testament feature the post Resurrection story of Doubting Thomas.  I personally would sure would like to put my own fingers on a piece of that metal that locals describe as kind of like tin foil.  A person could crumble it up and then tap it and it would go back to it's original shape.  If true, that kind of metal would not endear itself to the local auto collision repair shop. But I digress.

Roswell is like the Lourdes of UFO adherents, except it doesn't have anywhere near the same seriousness.  It does however have the same overwhelming number of souvenir hawkers and UFO paraphernalia sellers. Like Lourdes, Roswell embodies it's own little world for true believers complete with the hucksters who want to make buck off the true believers.  

When I was down in New Mexico, I was really surprised by the attitudes of some of the Natives I worked with in ceremonies.  There was no question for them that Roswell happened because they had story after story after story about their own alien encounters.  I found one very fascinating because there were photographs of the results of the encounter.  This story involved one particular area of the reservation where reported UFO activity was very high, and so were over flights of NSA or DOD helicopters trailing geo physics equipment.  I saw the choppers with my own eyes the year I heard this story, and yes they were black.  Anyway, the story goes that after a ceremony in the 80's a blinding beam of light was seen coming down from a very distant point of light in the sky.  Because of where the beam came down, it was way too dangerous for anyone to scale down an escarpment at night to see what happened at the terminal point.  The next morning when they looked over the escarpment there was a red car sitting in the middle of a desert valley in which there was no road access at all.  The elders stated the car sat there for six or seven years until it vanished as mysteriously as it showed up.  There were as many theories as to why it showed up as there were people around the campfire, but the photos of the car were interesting.  It was pretty difficult to see how anyone could have driven it to where it was photographed.  

When I asked if anyone ever explored the car, I was told not as far as they knew because it was considered bad medicine to disturb such a gift.  One elder started laughing and said it was a pretty useless gift since no one could actually use it unless they broke it down in pieces and hauled it out on horseback. And who wanted a red car anyway. I still don't know quite what to make of these stories, but by then I had enough of my own mind bending experiences in that geographical area to think anything was possible.

The general consensus was that Roswell probably involved a crash of a ship which could not find or could not get to one of the various energy portals in the New Mexico desertThese energy portals are places where the physics which keep this universe stable are not nearly as strong.  This becomes more plausible if one remembers New Mexico holds substantial uranium deposits.  The elders also laughingly pointed out that the US government, amongst others, has dozens of secret labs and projects going on in the New Mexico desert.  Los Alamos, although the most famous, is not necessarily the biggest, and then of course, there were all those black helicopters. Something had to be of interest to the government that went beyond testing drones and stuff.

What I found really interesting is how easily these elders incorporated the reality of aliens with in their traditional native beliefs. When they would speak about the Holy Ones, I wasn't sure just who that included, except to know it was very close to our concept of the Communion of Saints and Angels and did include alien ancestors.  The Holy Ones and ancestors lived in a multi verse of which our little reality was just one of many. Christians were far too provincial and far too limited in their understanding of the grandness and immensity of God's creation.  Jesus wasn't that way.  He was a Holy One. It was just his followers who didn't have a clue.  Just like those wingnuts traveling on pilgrimage to Roswell.

2 comments:

  1. Somewhere out there someone is wondering if this is parallel or tangent. And it is worth thinking about.

    p2p

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  2. Need to blog about it but I haven't yet, the idea that the narrow synthesis of the Bible as a complete, self-contained set of answers rather than a set of described experiences pointing to a greater reality is fatally flawed. The borrowing of popular images, narratives, and the like and the variety of representations of God and spiritual beings/experiences isn't a set of flawed contradictions to be sorted out by dense linear-minded theology. It is a collection mytho-historical accounts and poetic renderings that challenge, inspire, and offer a communal connection.

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